Welcome on our blog page! Here you will find an archive of news, links,
tip and tricks, featured websites, resources, tools and more!

SEP201230

Athabasca oil sands mining

The image on the right depicts a mine in the Athabascan region. Once
covered by ancient boreal forest the depicted area is now occupied by
huge ponds of toxic fluids.

The region holds locked into the sand under its boreal forest on
indigenous land, the second largest deposit of oil after Saudia Arabia,
but in a very different form. The oil is present as bitumen and to be
extracted requires the clearing of the forest, the removal of hundreds
of feet of soil and the use of enormous amounts of water to make it
fluid with consequent land, water and air pollution. As the energy required
to extract the oil is only slightly lower than the energy that will
be derived from it, this type of mining has only become "economically"
feasible in the latest years.

A collection of GIS case studies in marine science introduced by
Dawn Wright professor of geography and oceanography at Oregon State
University and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science. The book showcases how GIS can assist meeting the grand
challenges facing marine science.

Britain's National mapping agency is working to develop colour schemas
for map symbology that works well for everybody including people affected
by Colour Vision Deficiency (CVD).

CVD basically means an inability to see certain colours; often red
and green, but also other colours too. It affects approximately one
in 12 men and one in 100 women in the UK and can make the colours that
have traditionally used for maps virtually indistinguishable. That’s
a sizable minority of the population, all with a problem that is often
forgotten or overlooked.

The agency hired a number of people affected by CVD and let them
assess various combinations of colours.

With the latest release of ArcGIS Online, you can now add shapefiles,
text files (TXT and CSV), and GPX files directly to your web map. You
can drag data from your computer onto your map or, with just the click
of a button, add it to your map in the ArcGIS.com map viewer or ArcGIS
Explorer Online. Once you’ve added your data, you can configure pop-up
windows and change the symbols.

The Mountaintop Removal layer available under the Global Awareness
directory of Google Earth has exposed the areas affected by this destructive
mining practise to the world rising awareness of the issue among citizens
worldwide.

The layer includes fly through over the mining sites, descriptive
balloons of each sites and before and after overlays. Additionally
through the "My Connection" tool, visitors are linked to an interactive
PHP web page where their zip code, typed into a web form, is used to
query a MySQL database to identify their particular electricity provider,
the coal-fired power plants operated by that utility, and the actual
mine sites that have supplied those plants with coal over the past five
years.

Mountaintop
removal coal mining is changing the American landscape on a scale
that is hard to comprehend unless you see it from the air. Anyone who
has ever flown in a small aircraft over southern West Virginia or eastern
Kentucky will never forget the experience of seeing the massive scale
of destruction - mountain after mountain blown up and dumped into valleys
as far as the eye can see. Mountaintop removal affects more than mountains
and streams, however; it is threatening to displace and destroy a distinctly
American culture that has persisted in the Appalachian Mountains for
generations.

Mountaintop removal is a relatively new type of coal mining that
began in Appalachia in the 1970s as an extension of conventional strip
mining techniques. Primarily, mountaintop removal is occurring in West
Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee. Coal companies in Appalachia
are increasingly using this method because it allows for almost complete
recovery of coal seams while reducing the number of workers required
to a fraction of what conventional methods require.

The US Environmental Protection Agency defines mountaintop removal
as follows: “Mountaintop removal/valley fill is a mining practice where
the tops of mountains are removed, exposing the seams of coal. Mountaintop
removal can involve removing 500 feet or more of the summit to get at
buried seams of coal. The earth from the mountaintop is then dumped
in the neighbouring valleys.”

The process involves the clearing of the vegetation, the blasting
of the mountain, the dumping of the debris in the valley, the pollution
of water and land. A number of organizations and affected communities
are fighting this type of destructive practice. Learn more on:

Three days during which users can get updates on the latest GIS news
in the ESRI world,
attend useful technical workshops run by ESRI staff and hear how people
are using GIS around the world in several fields. We will be there!

ASITA, one of the biggest
GIS appointments in Italy this time in our home town! Come to visit
us, we will be at booth 14 available to start collaborative projects
and offering specials on training and software, games and more!

sep201119

Climate datasets

We remember the time when finding climate gridded dataset was very
difficult. Nowadays some great websites provide direct download for
detailed climate data for Europe and the World. We would like to present
the European Climate Assessment & Dataset (ECA&D) project, WorldClimat.org
and the Consortium for Spatial Information.

The European Climate Assessment & Dataset

ECA&D is receiving data from 56
participants for 63 countries and the ECA dataset contains 15953 series
of observations for 12 elements at 3605 meteorological stations throughout
Europe and the Mediterranean.

E-OBS is a daily
gridded observational dataset for precipitation, temperature and sea
level pressure in Europe based on ECA&D information. The full dataset
covers the period 1950-2010. It has originally been developed as part
of the ENSEMBLES project (EU-FP6) and is now maintained and elaborated
as part of the EURO4M project (EU-FP7). The datafiles contain gridded
data for 5 elements (daily mean temperature TG, daily minimum temperature
TN, daily maximum temperature TX, daily precipitation sum RR and daily
averaged sea level pressure PP). They cover the area: 25N-75N x 40W-75E.
The data files are in compressed NetCDF format available on a 0.25 and
0.5 degree regular lat-lon grid, as well as on a 0.22 and 0.44 degree
rotated pole grid.

WorldClim

WorldClim is a set of global
climate layers (climate grids) with a spatial resolution of a square
kilometer spanning a time period from 1950 to 2000. They can be used
for mapping and spatial modeling in a GIS or other computer programs.
The data layers were generated through interpolation of average monthly
climate data from weather stations on a 30 arc-second resolution grid
(often referred to as "1 km2" resolution). Variables included are monthly
total precipitation, and monthly mean, minimum and maximum temperature,
and 19 derived bioclimatic variables.

Consortium for Spatial Information

The fifteen international research centres belonging to the he Consultative
Group for International Agriculture Research (CGIAR) have pioneered
the application of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing
(RS) for sustainable agricultural development for more than a decade.
In May 1999, they formed the
Consortium for Spatial
Information (CGIAR-CSI) which links the CGIAR's GIS/RS laboratories,
and the many geospatial scientists and researchers within the CGIAR
system, with scientists and institutions from around the world. They
have already developed important collections of data on population,
poverty, climate, soils, crops, livestock, transportation, and biodiversity
and other geospatial Global Public Goods.

Western world addiction to energy consumption is pushing to exploit
always more dangerous and more destructive energy sources. The increase
of oil price due to the reduction of its available sources is making
other sources financially competitive at high environmental and health
cost.

The American landscape is dotted with hundreds of thousands of new
wells and drilling rigs, as the country scrambles to tap into this century’s
gold rush for natural gas.

The New York Times collected data from more than 200 natural gas
wells in Pennsylvania. Many of them are tapping into the Marcellus Shale,
a vast underground rock formation. But a method being used to stimulate
wells, called hydraulic fracturing, produces wastewater containing corrosive
salts and radioactive and carcinogenic materials. In Pennsylvania, this
wastewater has been sent through sewage treatment plants that cannot
remove some of the contaminants before the water is discharged into
rivers and streams that provide drinking water. The Times was able to
map 149 of the wells. Coloured circles show the amount over federal
limit for Radium, Uranium, Gross Alpha and Benzene.

The relatively new drilling method — known as high-volume horizontal
hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking — carries significant environmental
risks. It involves injecting huge amounts of water, mixed with sand
and chemicals, at high pressures to break up rock formations and release
the gas. With hydrofracking, a well can produce over a million gallons
of wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens
like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, all of which can
occur naturally thousands of feet underground. Other carcinogenic materials
can be added to the wastewater by the chemicals used in the hydrofracking
itself.

Following the Fukushima disaster several maps concerning nuclear
energy have been produced over the web. Nature News and Columbia University
have created an
interactive Google Earth map and
kml file
showing the risk associated to nuclear plants around the world based
on population density around the plants. Other factors are being assessed
such as typology and age of the plant, external threats and culture.
Information about each plant and a picture is also provided.

may201108

ArcGIS JavaScript APIs, how to refer to multiple
dojo libraries

This technique is useful when you need to include more than one version
of Dojo in the same page, for example perhaps you want to take advantage
of features in a different version of dojo than the one included with
the ArcGIS Server JavaScript API. To rename the namespace use djConfig.scopeMap
to map dojo,dijit and dojox to different names, in this case esriDojo,
esriDijit and esriDojox

After you rename the dojo namespace the ArcGIS Server JavaScript
API will use the dojo version included with the API. Developers can
use the ESRI version or load and use a different version of dojo for
portions of the page. When you are working with ArcGIS Server JavaScript
API code you will need to rename all references to dojo in your application
to esriDojo. For example, rename dojo.addOnLoad to esriDojo.addOnLoad
and dojo.require to esriDojo.require. However you don't need to change
the module names passed to the require function i.e. esriDojo.require("dojo.number").

In the last newsletter we talked about global warming. In this edition
we would like to talk about another major global crisis that is drawing
less attention than it deserves: the loss of topsoil. Topsoil is the
upper layer of soil (5-20cm). It is the layer that has the highest concentration
of organic matters and beneficial micro-organisms and insects at the
base of plant nurturing and soil fertility.

Worldwide topsoil is being eroded and compromised at a much higher
rate by human related practices that it can be generate by the very
slow biological and geological processes. Major impacts of this phenomenon
affects countries all over the world. Several are the causes at the
base of topsoil loss including agricultural practices, urban development,
overgrazing, deforestation and contamination by toxic chemicals.

Industrial agricultural practices including heavy machinery, tilling,
extended irrigation, and use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers
lead to erosion, compaction, salinization and loss of the beneficial
living organisms at the base of soil fertility. Often soil degradation
starts a chain of additional damages such as pollution for rivers and
coastal waters and higher sensitivity to floods.

The world’s four top crop-producing areas (U.S.A., the countries
of the former USSR, China and India) are all losing topsoil at an alarming
rate of over 13 billion tons per year.

Soil degradation maps

The maps on the side depict soil degradation around the world, the
first one showing the intensity of the damages and the second showing
the cause. The map are from 1997, today situation is likely even worst.

Soil classification

Soil classification deals with the systematic categorization of soils
using different criteria such as composition, forming processes, morphology
and suitable use. Soils are usually divided into layers and topsoil
is known as "A Horizon". Various classification systems are available
such as the FAO and USDA soil classifications.

Soil GIS data

Data on worldwide soils can be downloaded in ArcGIS format from the
World Soil Information foundation
funded by the Netherlands Government:

ESRI in collaboration with the Natural Resources Conservation Service
has recently released a web GIS application showing the distribution
of the twelve soils orders of the USDA classification down to a detailed
scale of 1:18000. A picture of each type of soil and a description of
its properties are provided.

mar201118

Digital Coast

Launched in 2008, the Digital Coast is a rich and dynamic website
hosted by NOAA and used to address timely coastal issues. Website content
is provided by numerous organizations and is continuously updated. It
includes data, tools, training and case studies and it promotes collaboration
among all actors involved in coastal areas management. Take a
video tour
of this useful website and consider the chance to contribute to it!

Data
The data sets represent some of the coastal data most requested by Digital
Coast partners. Access to data managed by the NOAA Coastal Services
Center is provided through the
Data Access Viewer, which allows for user-specified geographies,
formats, and resolutions. Other data sets are provided through various
mechanisms maintained by their agencies of responsibility.

ToolsThe tools featured by the website support coastal decision-making
by transforming Digital Coast data into information tailored for specific
issues. Some tools are Web-based, providing direct online analysis and
viewing, while others are downloadable extensions that provide new functionality
for desktop geographic information systems.

mar201105

The impact crater database

A very nice
KML file (Google Earth file format) displaying the location and
detailed information about several hundreds impact structures compiled
and made available by S. Levesque. The dataset includes confirmed, possible
and rejected locations. The first image on the side shows the location
and dimension of the non-exposed Manson crater featured in our "Where
is it" quiz of December!
Curios to see if there is an impact site not far from here you are located?
Check it out!

In most common usage, the term impact crater is used for the approximately
circular depression in the surface of a planet, moon or other solid
body in the Solar System, formed by the hypervelocity impact of a smaller
body with the surface. Impact craters typically have raised rims and
floors that are lower in elevation than the surrounding terrain. Meteor
Crater (featured in the "Where is it?" quiz) is perhaps the best-known
example of a small impact crater on the Earth.

Impact craters are the dominant landforms on many solid Solar System
objects including the Moon, Mercury, Callisto, Ganymede and most small
moons and asteroids. On other planets and moons that experience more-active
surface geological processes, such as Earth, Venus, Mars, Europa, Io
and Titan, visible impact craters are less common because they become
eroded, buried or transformed by tectonics over time. Where such processes
have destroyed most of the original crater topography, the terms impact
structure or astrobleme are more commonly used.

In the early Solar System, rates of impact cratering were much higher
than today. Currently the Earth experiences from one to three impacts
large enough to produce a 20 km diameter crater about once every million
years on average. This indicates that there should be far more relatively
young craters on the planet than have been discovered so far.

Although the Earth’s active surface processes quickly destroy the
impact record, about 170 terrestrial impact craters have been identified.
These range in diameter from a few tens of meters up to about 300 km,
and they range in age from recent times (e.g. the Sikhote-Alin craters
in Russia whose creation were witnessed in 1947) to more than two billion
years. (Source Wikipedia)

Feb201111

GlobCorine, Pan-European land cover and use
map 2009

Last October the new land cover map for Europe was released. The
map is based on ESA’s Envisat MERIS data from 1 January to 31 December
2009, is the first of its kind to be produced in such a short time –
nine months as opposed to years of the previous Corine editions.
GlobCorine
shows how an automated service can generate and regularly update such
maps, which are essential for environmental agencies. The map, providing
a resolution of 300 m, was delivered to the European Environmental Agency
(EEA), the project’s main user.

Snow leopards, Panthera uncia, inhabit some of the most hostile, snow-swept
and least productive territories on the earth. Their population may
count as low as 3,500 individuals, spread in a dozen of countries in
South and Central Asia, from Nepal to Russia, an area of more than half
a million square miles. The Snow Leopard Conservancy is a non-profit
organization working with local people to solve the conflicts between
the agropastoral activities and this big cat with the purpose of protecting
this charismatic species and to find optimal livestock management practices
for the farmers.
The Snow Leopard Conservancy is using GIS to try to best estimate
Snow Leopard population and to identify and manage its habitat. Mappamondo
GIS adopted one of the cub identified by the camera trap. To support
and know more about the Snow Leopard Conservancy efforts
visit their website!

The 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference was held from November
29th until December 10th in Cancun, Mexico. This conference represents
the 16th yearly meeting (COP16) of world leaders that has been held
since the establishment of the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UNFCCC is an international environmental
treaty established during the Earth Summit of Rio De Janeiro in 1992
whose objective is to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the
atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference
with the climate system.

The treaty itself set no mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions
for individual countries and contains no enforcement mechanisms. In
that sense, the treaty is considered legally non-binding. Instead, the
treaty provides for updates (called "protocols") that would set mandatory
emission limits. The principal update is the
Kyoto Protocol established during the third yearly meeting (COP3)
in 1997, which has become much better known than the UNFCCC itself.
Most industrialized countries and some central European economies in
transition (all defined as Annex B countries) agreed to legally binding
reductions in greenhouse gas emissions of an average of 6 to 8% below
1990 levels between the years 2008–2012.

The recent conference in Cancun served also as the 6th meeting of
the Parties (MOP6) to the Kyoto Protocol. Verifications of the Kyoto
protocol targets will be done in 2013, current results are of mixed
success and based on complex exchange mechanisms among countries.
Last year COP15 meeting in Denmark was expected to establish an ambitious
global climate agreement for the period from 2012 when the first commitment
period under the Kyoto Protocol expires. However no legal-binding agreement
was made with great disappointment from the scientific community. Again
this year meeting did not produce any legal-binding agreement although
a political agreement was made to limit global warming to less than
2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and a monetary fund was
established to support actions. Scientists see this as a fair modest
agreement as not sufficient to avoid dangerous climate change.

Hope is put for concrete measures to be agreed next year during the
COP17.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research is hosting the
Initiative Climate Change
Scenarios GIS data portal. This portal is intended to serve a community
of GIS users interested in climate change. The free datasets of climate
change projections can be viewed on-line and/or downloaded in a common
GIS (shapefile) or text file format. Many 2D variables from modeled
projected climate are available for the atmosphere and land surface.
These climate change projections were generated by the NCAR Community
Climate System Model, or CCSM, for the 4th Assessment Report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

ESRI has set up a website area dedicate to
GIS for
climate change where several resources are available including e-books
with case studies concerning the use of GIS for renewable energy, carbon
management, land change studies, climate modelling, ice cover studies
and more. A carbon footprint data model is also under development.

Nov201008

The living planet 2010

Humanity is now using nature's services 50 percent faster
than what Earth can renew, reveals the
2010 Living Planet Report, released Oct. 13 in Bristol, UK. Produced
by WWF in collaboration with Global Footprint Network and the Zoological
Society of London, the report examines the state of our natural world,
and our impacts upon it.

By 2030 humanity will need the capacity of two Earths
to absorb carbon dioxide waste and keep up with natural resource consumption.

A very interesting
atlas of maps showing information on biocapacity, consumption and
production per country was also produced.

OCT201016

Hungary toxic sludge, satellite images available
as KML files

Another major environmental disaster has hit the world, this time
in Europe.

GeoEye made available Ikonos images of the recent toxic sludge spill
in Hungary. See the below screen shots for before/after images; you
can also view the the imagery in Google Earth using this
KML overlay. Image credits Digital
Globe (before) and GeoEye (after).

Maps usually show Europe as a group of countries surrounded by the
seas. They focus on cities, roads and landscapes – the seas fall into
the background. The new European Atlas of the Seas hosted by the European
Commission takes the opposite perspective: it puts the seas and all
their different uses in the foreground.

We found of particular interest the visualization of data concerning
fishery activities such as fishing zones, quotas, catches and vessels.

This
free e-book , kindly made available by a team of researchers at
the University of Azores, is an up to date collection of scientific
papers concerning the use of GIS and Remote Sensing technologies to
support ecosystem based management within several marine sectors and
themes.

The North American Environmental Atlas represents an effort between
Canada, USA and Mexico to harmonize geographic information across North
America's political boundaries to depict significant environmental issues
at a continental scale.

The website offers a state of the art
data access gateway with easy data download in several formats (such
as shapefile, grids, GeoPDF, KML etc) as well as ArcGIS project files
including symbology (.mxd and layer packages). The online map viewers
features an online Google Earth 3D viewer.

This
KML file designed by David Tryse shows information about the 50 worst
oil spills since 1960, from tanker accidents and drilling operations,
as well as a number of other notable spills. You can open the file in
Google Earth by clicking the above link.

This site hosted by Google Crisis Response provides, beside the current
area concerned by the oil spill, a 24, 48 and 72 hours forecast as well
as all available satellite images since the spill occurred (MODIS, ENVISAT
Radar and NOAA Aerial photography). All data can be downloaded in KML
format.

Alarming is the counter of the estimated gallon leaked.

APR201018

Tree cover distribution maps for Europe

A great free data source for those needing data on tree cover. The
distribution maps available from this
website
were produced by members of the EUFORGEN Networks and other experts,
based on existing bibliography and other information sources. EUFORGEN
is a collaborative programme among European countries to promote conservation
and sustainable use of forest genetic resources. It serves as a platform
for pan-European collaboration in this area, bringing together scientists,
managers, policy-makers and other stakeholders. Distribution maps can
be downloaded in PDF, JPG or SHAPEFILE (in Lambert Azimuthal equal-area
projection) formats. The maps are updated as soon as new information
is available.

mar201024

ArcGIS Server Geometry Service

This is one of the most useful and revolutionary ArcGIS Server Online
services made available for free by ESRI. The geometry (web) service,
introduced with ArcGIS Server 9.3, provides geometric calculations such
as buffering, simplifying, calculating areas and lengths, projecting
and queries based on spatial relationships among features (intersection,
containment etc). The geometry service can be exploited easily by applications
built with the ArcGIS REST or JavaScript APIs. This line creates the
geometry service:

With the theme Map Your App, ESRI’s 2010 Mashup Challenge invites
members of the geodeveloper community to stretch their imaginations,
test their technical skills, and develop creative geospatial Web applications.

We invite you to have a look to our entry for this fun and interesting
contest in this 5 minutes video!

Fishery Analyst Online is a web GIS application aiming to effectively
query fishery data, analyze and visualize temporal and spatial patterns
of fishery dynamics. The main functions are quantitative estimation
and visualization of catch, effort, fishing success and their variation
in space and time. It also provides a mean for analysing fishing vessel
utilization, data quality control, and deriving information on the location
of important economic and threatened species.

It was developed using the ArcGIS Server Java Script APIs, the Dojo
framework and Google Chart APIs.

The application was born as a web evolution of the successful ArcGIS
Desktop Fishery Analyst application developed by the same author.

The online version aims to take advantage of the new web and server
based technologies provided by ESRI and the web in general offering
improved accessibility, data sharing, integration, centralization and
resources optimization beside new functionalities.

Institutions such as national, federal and international agencies
and universities working in the domain of fishery science and management
will benefit from this application.

A few ambitious projects have attempted to provide a global Digital
Elevation Model for the earth surface. The good news is that data are
freely available and constantly improving! Follow the hyperlinks to
access data download sites.

GTOPO30

One of the first available and widely utilized world DEM was the
GTOPO30 (resolution at 30 arcsecond, about 1Km). Its quality is
variable and in some areas it is very poor but it has been one of the
first products providing such an extensive coverage at a relatively
/for its time) high resolution. GTOPO30 was derived from several raster
and vector sources of topographic information.

The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM)

The Shuttle Radar Topography
Mission (SRTM) obtained elevation data on a near-global scale to
generate the most complete high-resolution digital topographic database
of Earth. Available resolution is 30 meters for the USA and 90 meters
for the rest of the world. SRTM consisted of a specially modified radar
system that flew onboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour during an 11-day
mission in February of 2000. SRTM is an international project spearheaded
by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Several years are required
to process the large amount of data and various versions of the dataset
were developed with improving accuracy. Version 4 of this dataset was
released in August 2009 by the
Consortium for Spatial Information (CGIAR-CSI) and it is probably
the best world DEM currently available.

The limitation with the GTOPO30 and SRTM datasets is that they cover
continental landmasses only, and SRTM does not cover the polar regions
and has mountain and desert no data (void) areas. SRTM data, being derived
from radar, represents the elevation of the first-reflected surface
— quite often tree tops. So, the data are not necessarily representative
of the ground surface, but the top of whatever is first encountered
by the radar. Submarine elevation (known as bathymetry) data is generated
using ship-mounted depth soundings. The SRTM30Plus dataset (used in
NASA World Wind) attempts to combine GTOPO30, SRTM and bathymetric data
to produce a truly global elevation model. New versions of the SRTM
are aiming to improve the quality of the dataset by removing artefacts,
filling data gaps using interpolation techniques and applying various
type of corrections.

Many national mapping agencies produce their own DEMs, often of a
higher resolution and quality, but frequently these have to be purchased,
and the cost is usually prohibitive to all except public authorities
and large corporations. USGS produces high resolution and more accurate
DEMs for the USA.

If you need DEMs as base layers you can surely take advantages of
the elevation map services made available for free by ESRI through
ArcGIS Online.

jan201010

Let's warm our new website!

We have redesigned our website hoping to provide better and easy
to access content! Do not hesitate to
contact us with suggestions
or comments about the website and of course enquiries about our products,
training and services. Feel free to shop at our new PayPal enabled online
store, to subscribe
to our periodic e-newsletter or our
rss feed, to read about
Conservation GIS programs and actions,
to challenge your geography knowledge with our geo-quiz "Where
is it?", or to stay up to date with news and technical tips reading
our blog!

WorldView-2 will provide the only high resolution
8-band multispectral commercial satellite imagery available. Along with
the four typical multispectral bands: Blue (450-510), Green (510-580),
Red (630-690) and NearIR (770-895), WorldView-2 is introducing the following
new color bands for enhanced multispectral analysis:

Coastal Band (400 - 450 nm):
This band supports vegetation identification and analysis, and supports
bathymetric studies based upon its chlorophyll and water penetration
characteristics. Also, this band is subject to atmospheric scattering
and will be used to investigate atmospheric correction techniques.

Yellow Band (585 - 625 nm):
Used to identify "yellow-ness" characteristics of targets, important
for vegetation applications. Also, this band will assist in the development
of "true-color" hue correction for human vision representation.

As
anybody concerned about the environment and sustainability of our actions
we are awaiting for the
United Nations Climate Change Conference, that will be held in Copenhagen
from the 7th to the 18th December.

It is more than three years since the drafting of text was completed
for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment
Report (AR4). In the meantime, many hundreds of papers have been published
on a suite of topics related to human-induced climate change. The purpose
of this report is to synthesize the most policy-relevant climate science
published since the close-off of material for the last IPCC report.
The rationale is two-fold. First, this report serves as an interim evaluation
of the evolving science midway through an IPCC cycle - IPCC AR5 is not
due for completion until 2013. Second, and most important, the report
serves as a handbook of science updates that supplements the IPCC AR4
in time for Copenhagen in December 2009, and any national or international
climate change policy negotiations that follow.

sep20094

ArcGIS Server Services Directory and REST APIs

Services Directory is a very important part of ArcGIS Server installation
and feature for developers that need to access information about the
available services.

The default start URL to access the Service Directory for an ArcGIS
Server installation is:

* Java: http://host:8399/argis/rest

* .NET: http://host/arcgis/rest

The REST API supports an admin console. The most useful operation
to perfrom through it is the clear cache option that refreshes Services
Directory information when updating services on your server (it is not
done automatically!)

Assuming a default installation, the admin console is available at
the following URLs:

* Java Server: http://host:8399/arcgis/rest/admin

*.NET Server: http://host/arcgis/rest/admin

Services Directory allows you to browse the contents of an ArcGIS
Server and obtain information that can be useful to you when developing
applications. Services Directory is a view of the ArcGIS Server REST
API in HTML format. Each ArcGIS Server instance has Services Directory
installed during the installation process. Services Directory helps
you do these things:

* Browse the contents of the GIS server and get service level metadata
You can navigate a series of links to view information about the services
on your GIS server. The links also allow you to preview how your service
looks in ArcMap, in a Web browser, in Google Earth, and so on.

* Get information to help you develop applications When you develop
applications with the JavaScript APIs you must provide URLs to services
and the layers and functionality they expose. Services Directory provides
an interactive way for you to construct those URLs. Services Directory
works using REST.

REST is an architectural style that allows ArcGIS Server to reveal
a hierarchy of information about itself through endpoints, or URLs.
When you use Services Directory, you navigate through a series of links
to discover information about the server. Every time you click a link,
you see a new page that reveals additional information about what's
available on the server. The information that you see on the page was
retrieved through REST using the page's URL.

If you wish to use the REST APIs in your application, have a look
to the online Getting Stared guide and learn how to construct requests
and get responses through URLs:

Building ArcGIS Server based web GIS application has never been so
easy! We will come on this subject more in details in the future, for
now just a brief overview:

The ArcGIS API for JavaScript™ (JavaScript API) is a browser based
API for developing high performance, easy to use mapping applications.
The API allows you to easily embed maps in your Web pages. The
JavaScript API is hosted by ESRI on ArcGIS Online.

If you are just
getting started, you can learn about using the JavaScript API to
create a map or task.

You can also take a look at the
samples. Many samples are available that show some aspect of the
JavaScript API. Most samples are a complete Web page, and you can view
both the code and the page display.

This script allows to
import bookmarks from one mxd project to another one. Paste this code
in the destination mxd ThisDocument code file (under Tools/Macros/Visual
Basic Editor) and link it to a button on the ArcMap toolbar.

PS: Since ArcGIS 9.3 this functionality is built in in ArcMap. You
can save to file the bookmarks in your origin mxd by going under Bookmarks/Manage
save and then load them in the destination mxd going under Bookmarks/Manage/Load...

jan200925

Script: 5 digits precision coordinates in ArcMap
status bar

Copy and paste the following code in the ArcMap VB Editor (Tools/Macros/Visual
Basic Editor) ThisDocument under the Project or Normal template and
run it to have the map coordinates of the mouse pointer displayed in
the status bar with 5 digits after the comma:

The 9.3 release of ArcGIS Server for the Java Platform implements
a role-based security model that allows you to define a set of users,
assign permissions to them based on the role they assume, and grant
access to GIS services and Web applications. To simplify the task of
protecting your GIS resources, ArcGIS Server Manager now provides a
rich UI experience for configuring Java EE security on your hosted GIS
services and the Web applications that use them.

This seminar introduces the new Server Manager options for configuring
security. The presenter demonstrates the GUI-driven workflow for implementing
security for GIS services and client Web applications. You will also
learn about the new token service option that provides an embedded security
solution.

The presenter discusses:

The security model architecture

Options for storing users and roles

Setting and configuring security for GIS services and Web applications
using Server Manager

ESRI Europe, Middle East and Africa User Conference
2008: meet us in London!

The
EMEA UC 2008 is a three day conference and will reflect ESRI and ESRI
(UK)’s vision for the future where GIS solutions will play an increasingly
vital role on an everyday basis in a myriad of different ways.

The EMEA UC 2008 attendees will include everyone interested in learning
more about how GIS is impacting on everyday life - GIS Users, GIS Managers,
Developers, System Architects and IT Professionals, technical software
users and key decision makers. The audience will also include partners,
customers, industry analysts and media partners. Delegates will represent
a wide range of industries including Central Government, Local Government,
Defence, Education, Environment, Health, Private Sector, Public Safety
and Utilities organisations.

ESRI announced the new ArcGIS API for Flex Beta at the ESRI International
User Conference in San Diego, California, which was held August 4–8,
2008.

ArcGIS API for Flex is integrated with Adobe Flex Builder 3 and can
be downloaded for free from ESRI. Flex is a client-side technology that
is rendered by Flash Player 9 or Adobe AIR. This means that application
developers now have the capability to combine geographic information
system (GIS)-based Web services from ArcGIS Server with other Web content
and display it in fast, visually rich, and expressive mapping applications
that can be deployed over the Web or to the desktop.

ArcGIS API for Flex takes full advantage of the powerful mapping,
geocoding, and geoprocessing capabilities of ArcGIS services. Application
end users can display their local data in an interactive map, search
for and display GIS data features and attributes, locate addresses,
identify features, and perform complex spatial analytics by simply clicking
a button or on the map.

Developers can program with ArcGIS API for Flex without installing
ArcGIS Server on their machine as long as they have access to ArcGIS
Server via a URL. Because the API is built on the Adobe Flex framework,
developers can incorporate Flex components, such as data grid, trees,
panels, and charts, into custom applications.

The Solar Boston map allows you to see active renewable energy installations
within the City, and to calculate the solar potential of building rooftops.
The map was created by the Boston Redevelopment Authority in cooperation
with the Solar Boston program. To view the map:
http://gis.cityofboston.gov/solarboston/

mar2008
3

Video tutorial (15min): What's new in ArcGIS
9.3"

The video will guide you through the major new features of ArcGIS
Desktop 9.3 including better options for bookmarks management, labeling,
graphic object conversion, klm support, editing and geoprocessing.

The ArcPhoto Tools are a set of geoprocessing tools and ArcMap user
interface enhancements to enable the quick import of digital photography
into the ArcGIS framework. The tools work directly off the EXIF (Exchangeable
image file format) header information that is encoded into digital imagery.
Read more about and download this free tool from the ArcScripts website:

Tasks are functional units that accomplish a business operation in
your application. The task framework provides an easy and systematic
way of writing and executing custom tasks. The framework is versatile
enough to generate the metadata for your tasks providing the relevant
html elements necessary to interact with the task. This enables you
to concentrate just on the functionality you are implementing. It also
provides a way to specify custom metadata information to have control
over fine grained details like using images for buttons and choosing
different layouts for your task inputs. Read more about the
Java and
.NET task framework...

This new white paper compares and discusses the tools and tasks provided
in the ArcGIS Server 9.2 Web Mapping Application and ArcIMS 9.2 Viewers.
The paper provides insight on how to customize and maximize each application.

Through illustrations, satellite images, ground photographs and powered
by Google Maps, this interactive
media depicts and describes humanity's past and present impact on the
environment. The primary focus is on environmental status and trends
over the last 30 years, in terms of both physical and human geography.

Here the second chapter about managing your raster data in ArcSDE
geodatabases. The document explains how ArcSDE provides efficient storage
and retrieval of raster data in a client/server environment. Where possible,
best practices for the loading, storage, and retrieval of raster layers
are given.

Have you ever wondered how to convert contour lines to a DEM? Topo
to Ratser is the tool you are searching for, available with Spatial
Analyst starting at ArcGIS 9!

Topo to Raster is an interpolation method specifically designed for
the creation of hydrologically correct digital elevation models (DEMs).
It is based on the ANUDEM program developed by Michael Hutchinson (1988,
1989).

See Hutchinson and Dowling (1991) for an example of a substantial
application of ANUDEM and for additional associated references. A brief
summary of ANUDEM and some applications are given in Hutchinson (1993).
The version of ANUDEM used is 4.6.3.

Topo to Raster is the ArcGIS 9.x implementation of TopoGrid from
ArcInfo Workstation 7.x.

Some cartographic trick to represent on a map the areas where land
and sea meet.

Representing where land and water meet can be done using a number
of methods, some of which are called coastal vignettes. Coastal vignettes
symbolize the water from the shoreline towards open water. A vignette
is usually thought of as a drawing (i.e., symbolized graphic mark) that
gradually fades into the surrounding background leaving an undefined
edge.

If you liked ESA website you can not miss NASA website on earth observations.

The Earth Observatory’s mission is to share with the public the images,
stories, and discoveries about climate and the environment that emerge
from NASA research, including its satellite missions, in-the-field research,
and climate models.

This document guides you through the setup, maintenance, and backup
of a raster database. These management tasks are presented using a case
study approach employing scenarios to illustrate the challenges faced
by a geographic information system (GIS) team. Each scenario will describe
a problem to solve, the logistics involved, and the choices made by
various GIS team members.

Feature classes and tables in a geodatabase can be queried and modified
using SQL. This technical paper discusses SQL and the geodatabase, how
to query and edit a geodatabase using SQL, multiversioned views, and
version reconcile, as an alternative approach to managing the geodatabase
using ArcGIS.

For those passionate about remote sensing a great website from the
European Space Agency (ESA) rich of earth observation programs, images
and applications.

Satellites show the world through a wide-enough frame so that complete
large-scale phenomena can be observed to an entirety it would take an
army of ground-based observers to match. Whether on global, regional
or local scales, space information can make a valuable contribution
to not just scientific comprehension but also our quality of life. It
is a way to more effectively understand the Earth system – which in
turn means we can better secure our environment and benefit all those
living within it.

This document defines the shapefile (.shp) spatial data format. It
lists the tools available in Environmental Systems Research Institute,
Inc. (ESRI), software for creating shapefiles directly or converting
data into shapefiles from other formats. This document also provides
all the technical information necessary for writing a computer program
to create shapefiles without the use of ESRI® software for organizations
that want to write their own data translators.

The European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (E-PRTR) is
the new Europe-wide register that provides easily accessible key environmental
data from over 10.000 industrial facilities in European Union Member
States and in Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.